EdTech Blog

Google Forms – How to use them

Google Forms are a powerful part of the Google Suites, or G-Suite as they now call it. Forms allows you to create on-the-fly questions with a variety of answering formats that can easily be shared, emailed, or embedded into a webpage.

What can you do with Forms?

Manage event registrations, whip up a quick opinion poll, collect email addresses for a newsletter, create a pop quiz, and much more.

You can create and analyze surveys right in your web browser—no special software is required. Even better, multiple people can work at the same time, and every change is saved automatically.

2. Creating a New Form / Designing your Template

At the time of this writing, you can create a form using a template, such as Blank, Exit Ticket, Blank Quiz, Assessment, or Worksheet. The forms homepage (link above) you see when first launching Forms will show your most recent forms.

Google is all about colors, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. By default, choosing a blank form will look most likely like this above purple scheme. If you want to change the colors or add an image background this can be done very quickly.

4. Editing the questions on your form

5. Advanced question options

Slide this to make your question required. Users will see a red asterisks * and will not be able to submit their form until that question is answered.

Clicking the three dots will give you some additional options. One of these is descriptionwhich can be really useful when clarifying what a question is asking.

Click here to learn more about data validation

Currently, only “Text”, “Paragraph text”, “Checkboxes”, and “Grid” questions have support for validation. Each question type has its own validation settings.

Text

Text fields have three types of validation settings:

Number: Ensure the answer is a number of a certain type. For example, you can specify that the answer is a whole number or a number between 21 and 42.

Text: Ensure the answer is text with a certain property. For example, you can restrict answers to text containing the word “lollipop” or only accept email addresses.

Regular Expression: Ensure that the text contains or matches a certain regular expression. (Regular expressions are powerful, but require some know-how. See the “Regular expressions” below to learn more.)

Paragraph text

Paragraph text fields have two possible types of validation settings:

Text: Ensure that the answer can have up to or at least a certain number of characters. For example, you can restrict answers to have at most 100 characters.

Regular Expression: Ensure that the text contains or matches a certain regular expression. (Regular expressions are powerful, but require some know-how.

Checkboxes

Checkboxes have two possible types of validation settings:

Select at least: Ensure that at least a certain number of checkboxes are checked in the answer.

Select at most: Ensure that at most a certain number of checkboxes are checked in the answer.

Select exactly: Ensure that exactly a certain number of checkboxes are checked in the answer.

Grid

Grid questions have only one validation setting:

Limit to one response per column: Ensures that an option can only be selected once per column. For example, if you have 3 columns that contain bed firmness ratings labeled “too hard”, “too soft”, and “just right” along with 3 rows of names (Mama, Papa, and Baby), then this validation will make sure that each bed is only chosen once (in other words, two people can’t select a bed that’s “too soft”).

7. Share and collaborate

Sharing your form for collaboration purposes

To work on your form with WWCSD staff all you need to do is share your form (or quiz). As with any Google document, people can make changes at the same time, and you’ll see their changes after they happen.

When you’re done editing your form, it’s time to start gathering some answers.

Here is how to share the Form so it can be filled out.
Click the SEND button to get the following screen.

To see how your form will look to others, click Preview

The default send option is to send the form vial email (or a group of emails).

As pictured here, you can send the form (as a link that will open in its own window) to specific emails with your subject and message.

Alternatively, you can also check the Include form in emailand you’ll be able to basically embed the form inside the email instead of the link option.

Another option for sending your form is by a link, which is almost the same method as the example above. This is useful especially if you have a mail list that’s not incorporated in Google… so this method can save you time in that regard.

Finally, you can embed the form inside of an HTML web-page. If you want to have this form placed on a website, or your blog, this would be the option to go with.